Knight’s Contract is a gory, gothic hack-and-slash game similar to Dante’s Inferno and the Devil May Cry series. Unlike those games, it’s not fun or interesting.

The player controls Heinrich, a former witch executioner cursed with immortality. He teams up with Gretchen, a resurrected witch who cursed Heinrich for killing her, to help her defeat six evil witches and their boss. Heinrich uses a giant sythe to rip enemies apart while Gretchen can cast various magic spells.

The game is one big, frustrating escort mission.

While Heinrich can’t die, Gretchen can and will. The player can’t let her stray too far, otherwise enemies will annihilate her. Gretchen’s AI has no sense of self-preservation. She’ll often stand in front of enemies as they attack rather than run away from them. And while Heinrich is immortal, he’ll still collapse or even get dismembered if he takes enough damage. The player has to tap the “X” button for a painfully long time, waiting for the knight to revive himself while Gretchen lets monsters hack at her.

It’s a frustrating experience that makes an already sub-par game worse. The combat is simple and repetitive: mash Square and Triangle repeatedly until everything around you dies. Combat can get slow and choppy when a lot of enemies are on screen, a technical problem we shouldn’t see on the PS3. The game is full of long load times, the cutscenes are painful to watch, and the poor level design results in you getting lost a lot. The graphics are inconsistent. Some of the characters look great but the environments are often ugly or boring.

While some of the bosses are well-designed, the battles themselves aren’t very fun, and end in quick time events because the developers figured “hey, they worked in God of War.” As always, Gretchen and the camera are your worst enemies during these battles.